With the 2 billion budget for the seven-year period 2021-2027, the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) is an invaluable tool for achieving Lombardy’s research, competitiveness and sustainable growth objectives. The work of the Lombardy Region starts from this awareness, illustrated by the regional councilor for University, Research and Innovation, during the conference ‘Energy, Development and Innovation: new European horizons for the Lombardy of the Future’ which closed the tour of the provinces wanted precisely to present the new possibilities and to try to stimulate the territory to do even better than the last programming which benefited over 25,000 companies and entities by activating projects worth over 1.8 billion euros (public and private resources).
“Planning and using these resources well – said the councilor – is an important responsibility. The new ERDF is the third fund active in the regional territory, immediately after PNRR and Law 9 (Lombardy Plan), which are the extraordinary tools with which we wanted to deal with the consequences of the pandemic crisis. The ERDF is not an extraordinary fund, but a structural and cyclical instrument. One of the central objectives of our programming, in fact, is to give continuity to what has been started in recent years with the extraordinary funds. In fact, these must not ‘drug’ the system, but lay the foundations for growth capable of persisting over time”. To date, tenders for over 700 million euros have already been activated. However, there are numerous initiatives already on the launch pad. Among these is ‘Collaborate and Innovate’ which provides 100 million euros to finance industrial research and experimental development projects carried out in partnership between companies and research organisations, including universities. The second measure provides for an allocation of approximately 40 million euros, aimed at strengthening the research infrastructures dedicated to technology transfer.
“A completely new path – underlined the councilor – is the one we have started with the Universities. We will also dedicate the same to the IRCCS, one of the excellences of Lombardy and which have a specific vocation for the life sciences. The path was born from the awareness that we have an extraordinary research value. However, it still struggles to reach the market, therefore to patent, to see the birth of start-ups, to raise funding from the market. We therefore want to intervene on this specific objective, strongly shared by stakeholders”.
A further measure in the pipeline for 2024 is that relating to ‘Skills’. To face the great challenges of digital and green transformation, it is also necessary to intervene on the quality and training of human capital. “The issues on which it will be possible to intervene and in which skills have a strategic value – concluded the councilor – are therefore numerous. I am thinking first of all of deep tech, that is, all those technologies that require high-intensity research and development activities, based on concrete engineering innovations or scientific progress and discoveries”.
